About Us
Last year as the pandemic unfolded a group of academics working on new curriculum content and blended learning -- with new urgency because of the lockdown mandate -- met to discuss its ramifications. Richard, Catherine, Stephen, and Janus, and soon joined by colleagues such as David Sepeke Segwele, sat around a table, and then in zoom sessions, thinking about this pandemic, and previous pandemics, drawing up adaption scenarios for unexpected and anticipated challenges, and we also read voraciously across journalistic platforms and published commentaries (by our local peers and global colleagues), about their emerging pandemic experiences.
It was life “speeded up” as many have commented, and the urge to share lessons learned, “hacks” to solve problems, ways to gain quick wins, and processes to hone thinking on our feet. This compelled us to create a shared open and yet rigorous platform. We wanted to use the best of inherited academic traditional spaces for this, (the “seminar), with the new “podcasting” techniques and live engagements online, and also open to the wider academic community. We also wanted to give Health Systems Sciences more prominence and draw more attention to the medical and Health Humanities treasure chest within the Adler Museum at WITS -- and its specific collections about pandemics through the twentieth century and before. Out of this zeitgeist, we decided that we should host a critical engagement webinar series around health systems challenges, as a collaboration between the Department of Family Medicine and Primary Care, and the Adler Museum.
Our aim with this series was to create a space in which we discuss, debate, and evaluate the ever-changing body of knowledge emerging because of the current COVID-19 pandemic. As we were discussing the series and thinking about the complexity of the challenges in the health system, as a result of the pandemic, and where and how we ended up in this situation, we thought about the fascinating and endangered creature in our region -- but whose family branches exit on several continents: the resilient and yet vulnerable pangolin. They captured our imagination at our starting point, because of the challenges they face, and their survival story, the resilience they show, and the interconnectedness they now have with health, with pandemic spread, with climate change and poaching -- and with the rapid globalisation of threats to animal, plant and human life, a phenomenon increasingly referred to in geophysical, zoological and humanities spaces as “the Anthropocene”.
Inspired by the image, characteristics and survival story of the Cape Pangolin, whose close relatives are found across the globe, this webinar series seeks to unpack the interconnectedness of health, humanities, environment and science, through a lens of systems-thinking. As is exemplified by the story of the pangolin - an ancient, yet endangered creature - the narratives that have emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic reveal a tracery of inter-linkages: simultaneous and persistent epidemics; protective lock-down defences, highlighting both strength and vulnerability; adaptivity and nimbleness alongside the burden of inherited and keratinized structures. The pangolin’s Fibonacci-like patterns evince the complexity of this crisis, the puzzles facing scientific experts, and the conundrums in our human responses.
The series drew a wide audience and requests for the use of the podcasts for teaching, and for research -- and we showcased prominent thinkers from across different disciplines, universities, activist and service delivery, and technical spaces – and stimulated conversations across these boundaries.
As Pandemic Pangolins drew to its close, we decided that we would host another series in the second half of 2021 -- focused on the inspiration drawn from the pandemic around innovative thinking and what we dream for the future, with a title to match: “Dreaming Disruption”.
We also decided that we should craft an enduring platform for this within the Faculty of Health Sciences here at WITS, where we can host these and other webinar series on a regular basis, and their related bibliographies and podcasts, so that it becomes an easy space for anyone to access and where they can register their connection.
After a number of brainstorming sessions and a great deal of discussion, we decided on the web-based name: Wits-Wethu. “Wethu” is the isiZulu word for “Our” and the platform is intended to be our collective space to host critical engagement webinar series, and we hope will become a chosen venue for collective thinking for our wider academic and other communities, using the webinars and related content resources.